Hearing aids are very small and delicate devices and comprise many electronic and metallic components contained in a housing or shell small enough to fit in the ear canal of a human or be located behind the outer ear. The many electronic and metallic components in combination with the small size of the hearing aid housing or shell impose high design constraints on radio frequency antennas to be used in hearing aids with wireless communication capabilities.
Moreover, the antenna in the hearing aid has to be designed to achieve a satisfactory performance despite these limitations and other high design constraints imposed by the size of the hearing aid.
The developments within wireless technologies for hearing devices and the continuous efforts to make hearing devices smaller and more cost effective to manufacture has led to the use of flexible carriers incorporating one or more antennas in hearing devices.
Still further, in binaural hearing aid systems, the requirements to the quality of the communication between the hearing aids in the binaural hearing aid system are ever increasing, and include demands for low latency and low noise, increasing the requests for effective antennas in the hearing aids.